Street Fighter II

[Archon_Wing]

A long time ago, I saw a funny-looking fighting game. I'm not much of fan of the quarter-munching machines, but many a friend possesed something called a Super Nintendo. It was the most advanced video game system of the time, and my reaction was around the lines "like whoa." It sure beat the undetailed sprites of 8-bit systems. Each character was distinct and fairly large. And it had voices! People yelling random stuff! I never thought a video game could talk :D That was groundbreaking!

I ended up playing it, and thought that button-mashing was an effective tactic. Sure it took forever to beat the computer but randomly throwing punches and suddenly hearing your character yell "Hadoken" was a boon.

So, skip about 10 years, and we are at the present. I have seen and occasionaly played the newer incarnations of this game, but I never really got intested. But it turned out one of my friends still had a Super NES and the game running. From playing my friend, I realized that button-mashing was no longer effective. The game actualy had strategy. I pretty much recolied in shock in thinking that these games could possbily take skill. (But then, D2 takes some skill too....) It turned out to be more than just jump kicking and randomly pushing buttons. Having control of the special moves was not enough. You had to take advantage of every aspect of your character. Yes, you can beat the computer with repitious patterns. But it would fail against better players. And you really have to play them to know what I'm talking about this. Once I did one pattern that seemed to work well, people eventualy adapted to it, and I had to find something else to do.

It's true. It doesn't have fancy 3d graphics or orchestrated music. It doesn't even have an abundance of scantidly clad women in it. But while a lot of shallow folk keep talking about those qualities that many games today have, they forget about what makes a game good. Sure a game can have bad graphics and bad gameplays, but I digress. Playing this game is an experience! This game is what Pacman and pong is to many. They don't make games like they used to. ;)

Does anyone have any thoughts? Tips? :)

[Sir_Die_alot]

Yoga flame, yoga fire, medium kick.

[whyBish]

"Tiger","Tiger","Tiger Uppercut"

[Guest]

I had a room mate in college who could play the game blindfolded. Blindfolded he could beat most everyone else on our dorm floor and could beat the game well into the bosses.

It was very odd to watch him do this.


Of course this guy tended to only speak in battlescrys from Street Fighter mixed in with quotes from the X-men TV show.

[Sir_Die_alot]

L O L ! That is twisted.

[NiteFox]

If we're talking stock SFII, then Guile is your man. Never lags after his Sonic Boom, and you can hold defensive crouch indefinately in order to pre-charge either the Boom or Flash Kick.

From the opposite side of the screen, throw a slow Sonic Boom then follow it in. Depending on what the opponent does with the Sonic Boom you can counter easily:

High Block = Low fierce sweep.
Jump Straight Up = Jump into, forward + medium punch = Air back breaker.
Jump Forward = Crouch + fierce punch = Uppercut, or a Flash Kick of your choice.

Plus, a neat little hitter is a forward jump + medium kick, crouch and fierce kick on landing, followed by a pre-charged Flash Kick or Sonic Boom when they get back on their feet.

Ryu & Ken have a neat little cheap tactic that has been present from SFII all the way up to Alpha 3 = Forward jump + Weak punch or kick, followed by a crouch on land whereupon you can hammer weak kick for up to six hits (SFII, Turbo, Champion). When Super & Super X included different recoil rates for characters, you could hammer a tall character (Zangief, Sagat, T. Hawk) or Fei Long for up to ten hits without breaking into a sweat.

Blanka: Fierce Cannonball Roll is an absolute killer at close range, plus he gets excellent range off his crouch + Fierce Punch.

Chun Li: Her down + Weak Kick while jumping results in a head stomp, and the best thing is you bounce off your opponent's skull when you hit. With creative wall-jumping and a suitably poor opponent you can score multiple hits (I clocked six once.) If you wait until the last moment to stomp, literally just before you land, you can stomp twice (First hit strikes at around the knee/groin area, next on the chest or head). Head stomping is undoubtably the biggest cheese-out of the game, and I guarantee you will be beaten up in real life by your opponent if you finish them off with nothing but head stomps :)

Zangief: Still having trouble with the Spinning Piledriver? Yeah, I don't blame you either. Seems the "Spin pad 360 degrees" is a tad misleading. The proper way (i.e. The way that results in a chance of it happening) is to stand about a soft-punch's length away (i.e. You miss just barely with soft punch), press forward then swing the pad down-forward, down, down-back, back, back-up, up, forward-up very quickly so that the jumps don't register. Then tap a punch. 315 degrees, tsk...

E. Honda: Swan dive/Butt drop + Hundred Hand Slap do not friends make. Then again, what's friendship to beating someone up in style? ;)

[Archon_Wing]

Oh yea, I forgot to state my favorite character was Guile. :D

Ryu & Ken have a neat little cheap tactic that has been present from SFII all the way up to Alpha 3 = Forward jump + Weak punch or kick, followed by a crouch on land whereupon you can hammer weak kick for up to six hits

Lol! It's pretty easy when you're not on the recieving end. But what if you are? :)

  If you wait until the last moment to stomp, literally just before you land, you can stomp twice (First hit strikes at around the knee/groin area, next on the chest or head). 

That sounds painful! :D

Head stomping is undoubtably the biggest cheese-out of the game, and I guarantee you will be beaten up in real life by your opponent if you finish them off with nothing but head stomps

I don't know. I think my constantly abusing her throws makes people send death threats towards me. But I didn't know about the head stomp. ;)

Recently, I learned that the funny spinning bird kick was actualy not that bad.

[[wcip]Angel]

Don't remember her name, but I seem to recal my favourite character was some mildly scantily clad girl who could "helicopter" her way upside down into an opponent. It may have been the Chun-person.

[Chaerophon]

As far as I'm concerned, in SFII, the "defensive characters" will always be able to take the cake. By defensive, I am referring to Ken, Ryu, Guile, and (if in super), Sagat. What makes a defense-oriented character? If you can hurl projectiles and respond to leaping approaches with an upwards directed counter, you never need to attack. For all intents and purposes, when these characters are perfectly played they are all but unhittable.

[WarLocke]

Great! Now go find yourself a Tekken Tag Tournament machine, so you can enjoy the best fighting game ever made. B)

[Omni]

I think I played Tekken once, and I hated it. <_< No, the best fighting game would be The Last Blade 2, for Neo Geo. I play it daily.

Edit: thought someone might find this funny. I just downloaded a Neo Geo fighting game called Waku Waku 7, which basically aims to be the strangest fighting game ever. You know how pretty much every fighting game has a Ryu clone, complete with fireball and dragon punch? Well, the Ryu clone in this game is a cylindrical punching bag named Bonus-kun. :blink:



Here you can also see the game's end-boss, Fernando the giant... ball... thing.

[WarLocke]

Dude. You don't like Tekken? :blink: What's wrong with you?

About the only bad thing I can say about it is that noone has a fireball[1] - oh wait, that's a good thing. B)

Seriously though, I realize different people have their own taste, but the Tekken games have consistently been the best balanced and most fun fighters I've played. And the controls aren't all butterfly-ey like the Virtua Fighters (and to a much lesser extent, Sould Edge/Calibur/2).

Mokujin & Yoshimitsu 4 lyfe, yo!

[1]: Okay, the second from of the boss can breath fire... But he's cheap, we all know it.

[Taem]

I don't like Tekken because you don't need ANY skill at all to beat your opponents! I was playing my friend (whom I sincerly swear I'd bet my house, wife and kids, job, and soul that this guy is one of the best gamers on earth) who usually masters a game after beating it within a day at Tekken and I was getting "owned" by him severly when actually trying to beat him, so I just started "smashing" the control pad and whola, a 50-65% win ratio on my part. Perhaps my tactics confused him. Perhaps he could not adapt or maybe there was no defense against the DREADED CONTROLLER SMASH ATTACK, but I did the same thing to the compter and starting winning. It was at that point that I realized there was NO POINT to Tekken or most fighting games because there is NO SKILL REQUIRED to win. At least with SS2 or SS2-Turbo or Alpha, you had to know tactics.

IMO, Mortal Combat 1 and 2 were one of the best tactical fighting games ever made complete with combos and death moves... And the best part? It required skill to win and skill to beat your opponents. If you had skill, you ruled all - hands down. No cheap controller smashing techniques would work against you, and no cheap controller smashing techniques would beat the game. Yes MC 1 and 2 are where its at!

[WarLocke]

Not trying to sound confrontational here, but the Tekken games are easily the deepest fighters I've played.

Yes, with some characters (Eddy Gordo/Tiger, Hwoarang/"Bob", Law to a lesser extent, maybe Ling) you can mash and maybe win, but with the majority of characters that won't work because they don't have very many transitional moves, just poking strings.

I have yet to see another fighter that has counters, chickens (counter-counters), linked grabs/throws, grab/throw escapes/reversals, the depth of horizontal/vertical strikes vs sidesteps (though Soul Calibur comes close), pokes, juggles, unblockables with weaknesses and more that is as balanced or fun.

Tekken most definitely takes skill. Try playing Yoshimitsu (or Kunimitsu for the sadists) against a good player; Yoshi has some off-the-wall moves, but his movelist is very limitted compared to other fighters - you've got to constantly change your stance to keep from telegraphing your moves and eating a Wind God Fist.

Or take a Nina/Nina fight with two good players. Both characters are fast and agile, have outright deadly linked grabs, and can counter/chicken. You can't simply rush in or the other guy'll pop some of your joints, but if you both turtle nothing ever happens. A good Nina/Nina fight (sometimes Nina/Anna fights are even better) looks like a freakin' dance. B)

[jms]

Any fighting game, recent ones especially, gets my respect. Fighting games developed today aren't cash cows by any means; definitely not if the developer doesn't have a successful franchise or a genuine passion for the genre. So, an argument can be made for the quality and depth of gameplay in lots of series today (a couple notable exceptions :rolleyes:) as well as the classics.

But there's only ONE...!


Archon,

Do you have any specific questions? matchups? B)

[LiquidDamage]

I love Street Fighter. I started with SFII in the arcades back in 1991, before the days of game magazines that told you how to do the moves, because no game to date worked quite like SFII. The "flying uppercut" as we called it (no one knew who the hell Sheng Long was or why you had to defeat him to stand a chance against Ryu) was performed by "wiggling the joystick in the corner and pressing punch". We knew a guy that could do it one handed while eating with the other hand. We thought Guile (who most people pronounced "goo-lee", but not me) had a knife, and that "sonic boom" was actually "knife, ooh!" and we called his Flash Kick the "knife kick". We had no idea what anyone said in the game. Sho-Ryu-ken sounded like "ha-hil-jak" to us. Hadoken sounded like "kool-jak" (which we made fun of by saying "cool jerk"). As you can see, "ken" sounded like "jak" unless it was used as a character's name. Hell, we thought Dhalsim said "You're on Fire", because we definately heard an "on". Our local pizza parlor (back when they had good games and arcades were rare) had SFII groupies that would watch us play and yell "use your 'inner power'!"

The NES SFII was the first game where we actually heard the words we were supposed to hear, with the exception of Tatumaki-senpuu-kyaku which STILL sounds like "a-smatjak-smowjak" to me.

Anyway, because I played it in the arcade first, I think in "Jab, Strong, Fierce, Short, Forward, Roundhouse" not "Light Punch, Medium Punch, Heavy Punch, Light Kick, Medium Kick, Heavy Kick", so forgive me if I confuse.

If the one you are playing is not Super Street Fighter II, GO GET IT. The game plays the same, has fun new characters (Bruce.. I mean Fei Long, man!), some cool new moves, and an undocumented turbo mode (I think you just press right or left on the D-pad next to the start screen). With the turbo feature, it is arguably the best SF game ever (I prefer arcade SFAII myself, but the SSFII on the SNES is a close second). I dare say that I majored in Street Fighter in college, the SNES SSFII and arcade SFAII being where I spent most of my time.

Tips, at least for this one, some will work even in the original version:

Controls: Be sure to arrange your controls so the most used buttons are x, y, a, and b. The R and L buttons dont respond as quickly, as they have to be pressed a little more and your fingers arent going to be as fast as your thumb. I assign buttons as follows:

Fierce (HP): X
Jab (LP): Y
Roundhouse (HK): A
Forward (MK): B
Strong (MP): R
Short (LK): L

I use this config because the most commonly used attacks are the most powerful ones, usually followed by the weakest and fastest ones. The reason I use Forward (MK) instead of Short (LK) on B is that some characters, like Cammy, Guile, and Chun Li, have fantastic Forward kicks and really crappy Short kicks, and with Ken and Ryu you can fit a Forward kick in between a jump kick and a fireball. I put Strong on R because I am right handed, and strong is good for throws if you want to use some of the different looking ones that some characters have.

Character tips not mentioned earlier in the thread:

1) Chun Li - Chun Li is my best character in the later games when the Dragon Punch isn't so all-powerful. She is still damn good in this one.
a) The Spinning Bird Kick (charge down for 3 seconds, up and kick) is invulnerabile for a split second at the beginning. Excellent for incoming jumping enemies, and fantastic against fireballs fired in close-- you dodge the fireball and will hit them with a kick before they can recover from the animation. This can also be performed in the air after a wall jump if you are totally insane and want to spend hours trying to do it.

B) She has a 3 hit combo that doesnt involve any special moves-- jumping Fierce (HP) followed by crouching Forward (MK) followed by a standing Fierce (HP). If you hit them recently before, it will often dizzy them.

c) The medium kick is probably her best kick. When crouching, it is fast and has good range, when jumping, it has good priority and sticks the furthest out front of all her jumping attacks. It is also the button you use for the head stomp.

2) Guile
a) Evil, Evil Cheese- you can throw a sonic boom right next to someone, and if they block it, have a free throw. This will really, really piss people off. I don't do it unless they are complete asshats.
B) The Legendary Four Hit Combo - Jumping Fierce (HP), Standing Fierce (HP) - uppercut, Fierce (HP) Sonic Boom, Standing Fierce (HP) - backhand. Good luck getting this, the sonic boom is achieved by charging while in mid air, and pushing forward and RELEASING the punch button after the standing fierce. This is called a 2-in-one. Also, the SNES will slow to a grinding halt after the sonic boom, and the odds of actually having the next button press register before the opponent recovers from the stun are approximately 1 in 10. Even more luck getting it on a competent human opponent. I've done it once.

3) Fei Long - I love Bruce. They totally hosed his sounds in SFA3 when they brought him back, so enjoy the extended high pitched yells while you can in SFAII
a) The Legendary Five Hit Combo - Jumping Fierce (HP) or Roundhouse(HK), Standing Fierce (HP) 2-in-one to Rekka Ken (3 hit screaming punch combo). This, again, is very, very hard to do (for me at least), though the problem isnt that the game slows down, its that three "fireball" motions in a row are murder on my poor left thumb, and the standing fierce is pretty hard to segway into the Rekka Ken. I think I've done this twice (on the SNES, anyway, its pretty easy in the arcade) against a competent human opponent.
B) there is no b. He's pretty straight forward in all other respects.

4) Balrog - thats right. Balrog. He sucked in the other two games, but now he is quite the opponent.
a) The Shoulder Butt (like Guile's Flash Kick with a punch) is invulnerable. It is his best anti-air attack, and goes through fireballs
B) Range. Balrog has mega range, and this allows him to be really, really annoying, because you can alternate Fierce (HP) punches and Dashing Punches (Sonic Boom motion) ALL DAY LONG. Be sure not to actually do it all day long, or people will be pissed. Mix it up.
c) 3 hit combo - Jumping Fierce (HP), Crouching Fierce (HP) two-in-one to Dashing Punch
d) hold down all three of one button and fight with the others fo 50 seconds, release, and if you hit, you will take off half your opponent's life. This is something you do when you just want to screw around, because it is pretty obvious that you are doing it.

5) Blanka
a) when they dizzy, press into them and do a Forward (HK) followed by the Head Bite. Charge back while biting, and hit them with the ball as soon as they get out. If they miss the block, its quite a bit of damage. You probably don't want to do the last part against Ken or Ryu, or you will take an uppercut in the cajones.

Interesting trivia: In the arcade, there was a bug that allowed Zangief to do the Siberian Suplex (piledriver with the kick button) from the other side of the screen. Basically, if you did it at just the right time after a blocked move, it always connected. People stopped playing SSFII at my arcade when people learned how to do this. It started by people choosing Zangief and their opponents simply walking away, even after massive winning streaks, because you could hit them after blocking a fireball even. Eventually, people just stopped showing up. I've never done it, and I don't know if it exists in the SNES version.

[NiteFox]

4) Balrog - thats right.&nbsp; Balrog.&nbsp; He sucked in the other two games, but now he is quite the opponent.

Lousy in SFII & T, Good in Super, excellent in Alpha 3. Seriously. Balrog is much faster than he's ever been. You can string dash punches/uppers together with ease, his turn punch is quicker charging (Though you still have to charge for ridiculously long amounts of time in order to really strip energy). And he's just... Brilliant. I play him regulary in Super and Alpha, and he's easily capable of surprising someone who is more familiar with his earlier incarnations.

And they've never fixed his main problem. Same applies for Birdie with his Bull Horn. You can charge his Turn Punch in the time between rounds/fights. Beat an opponent, and as they're bouncing off the ground hold down the punch buttons. Never skip any of the "betweeners" (Score tally, win quote, next fighter etc.) and you should be fully charged by the time the next round starts. This is even more obvious in Alpha 3 where the time between rounds (From victory pose to Fight!) is ridiculously long.

[pakman]

HAHA. We play Tekken TAg here in the dorm all the time. My combo that I can beat everyone with: Eddy and either Lee or Heihachi. Let the cheapness begin.

As for old games, such as those on the SNES, I prefer Mortal Kombat. My favorite characters were Sub-Zero because I either freeze you or make you slip on the ice, or Scorpion. "GET OVER HERE!"....uppercut..."GET OVER HERE!"...uppercut, etc, ad nauseam.

[Archon_Wing]

Meat, I had the same first impression of Tekken too. :P

Of course, maybe there is a strategy; a point where button mashing won't work very more. Seems like that point is kinda high, but I never really played it too much, so I won't pass judgement.

Yea! Nina... too powerful. :P

Edit: Mortal Kombat. Now that was a game!

[swirly]

Speaking of Mortal Kombat reminds me of something I've been noticing alot lately. Alot of fighting games anymore seem to be based largely on special moves. In order to get good at them and win you have to learn how to do the special moves and then mainly just use them. With mortal kombat it was more of a balanced thing. Often if somebody was using special moves too much you could switch to actually fighting and then win by not giving them any space or time to do things. (I beat a friend of mine not too long ago by doing this. Really pissed him off too hehe.) You actually had to be able to fight in both ways. Now I haven't played alot of the newer games that everyone loves, but some of the ones I have played seem to be of the type that you really have to focus on the special moves.